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Albee the Enigma, Now the Inescapable

Edward Albee, who turns 80 next year, at his home in TriBeCa. Four major productions of his plays are in the works.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

THE small, disintegrating painting — delicate flowers flaking off silk — is the work of a French master, but the story about it is pure Edward Albee. Hanging in his TriBeCa loft, almost unnoticeable amid a forest of African sculpture and walls of bold abstractions, it is, Mr. Albee said during a conversation there recently, a puzzle, or rather the key to one. He bought it ages ago, thinking it some kind of sketch or study, only to discover much later the existence of a larger painting with a hole in its middle, of which his flowers were clearly the missing, central piece.

“I should probably reunite them,” he said with a smile indicating no intention of doing so.

Something of beauty, something of an enigma and something removed from its context too: not a bad précis of Mr. Albee’s life and work. But if he remains a puzzle even to many who know him, he is a reassuringly solid one. Unlike the painting, he bears no marks of flakiness, and as for disintegration — he turns 80 in March — he has little but a pair of hearing aids and the death of loved ones to show for his age. He remains restless and protean, even in his fixity. When the digital recording of one of our conversations mysteriously disappeared after he examined the recorder, he invited me back the next day, impishly promising (and faithfully delivering) completely different answers.

Like someone who goes bald early and thus appears to stay the same age for decades, Mr. Albee has pulled off the neat trick of remaining an enfant terrible long after his terrible infancy balded him emotionally. Read all about it in “Three Tall Women”: When you are adopted by parents who seem to regret their decision, the circuitry of rebellion gets hard-wired early. You drop out of school, go to live among the gay bohemians of Greenwich Village, make your name writing about dogs with erections. Even now Mr. Albee’s eyes spark with satisfaction when he gives a contrary answer, makes an obscure reference, mystifies, illuminates, divulges, withholds.

Over the course of some 30 plays, he has at his frequent best done all of these at once. Better still, and unlike his more didactic colleagues, he has usually managed to be funny too. At the very least he is always interesting: “Theater should be a tough experience like anything else,” he said, “but it also has the responsibility not to be boring.”

As such, he remains fearless in his embrace of any taboo, especially sexual. Though this can be a difficult pose to hold, he manages; recent works include fantasias on bestiality, anal rape, voluntary mastectomy and reverse circumcision. “I will go absolutely anywhere,” he said, meaning perhaps that, sharklike, he must.

Of the generation of theatrical giants who came to international prominence in the 1950s with plays that not only won Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes but actually seemed to register in the culture as well, he is the only one, with the possible exception of Horton Foote, still going strong. On the heels of excellent Broadway revivals of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Seascape” in 2005, the current theater season includes four major New York-area productions of his work.

If it’s an inadvertent retrospective (he said it happened entirely by chance), it’s still an apt one, sampling and in a way blending the earliest and the latest parts of his career. This is most vividly the case with “Peter and Jerry,” which opens Sunday at Second Stage in a production starring Bill Pullman, Dallas Roberts and Johanna Day. In it, Mr. Albee performs a kind of vascular surgery on his 1958 debut, “The Zoo Story,” suturing it to a new first act that enriches but does not explain the themes and action of the original.

Next comes “Me, Myself & I,” a new play starring Tyne Daly as the not entirely sane mother of identical twins named otto (spoken with a quiet voice) and OTTO (with a loud one); it opens in January at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J. An identical twin also figures in “The American Dream,” the 1960 one-act that Mr. Albee himself will direct on a double bill with “The Sandbox,” starring F. Murray Abraham, at the Cherry Lane in March.

And while he admits that the persistence of the theme of splintered identity in his work is probably biographical in origin (“Being adopted,” he mused, “did I want to be an identical twin?”), that’s the extent of his interest in the connections between life and art. The connections are there, he said, but are not terribly valuable: “They don’t determine the limitations of your experience.” It’s no accident that in “Three Tall Women,” the only one of his plays he considers at all autobiographical, his “mouthpiece” character is given neither name nor lines.

And yet the last of this season’s four Albee productions explores such connections head on. In May the Signature Theater Company resurrects “Occupant,” which was shut down before it officially opened in 2002 when its star, Anne Bancroft, became ill. Now Mercedes Ruehl, a frequent Albee interpreter, takes the role of the sculptor Louise Nevelson, who, looking back from beyond death, tries to unweave (or possibly tangle) the threads of personality and art.

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Bill Pullman, left, and Dallas Roberts in Edward Albees Peter and Jerry at Second Stage Theater, one of four productions of Albee works scheduled in the next few months in the New York area.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

From his living room sofa or from the speaker’s lecterns at which he frequently finds himself, Mr. Albee does much the same thing. At a recent tribute to Terrence McNally, Mr. Albee hastily segued from their shared history (“I saw this breathtakingly handsome 19-year-old, and so I thought I really ought to get to know him”) to praise that sounded like a curse (“The Pulitzer Committee will get to you, Terrence, they’ll get to you eventually”) to a plea for the improved teaching of arts and civics in the nation’s classrooms. He seemed happiest on that theme.

He later explained that he looks at the world “with interest and objectivity,” just as he has always (“except during the 10 years I was drinking so heavily”) looked at himself and his writing. It would certainly be hard to imagine a less romantic description of the writing process: One day he finds himself “knocked up” with a play that had been gestating unbeknownst. Then he merely “delivers” or transcribes it, pretty much intact.

Although he can, especially in recent years, be gracious in sidestepping or rerouting deeper questioning, he still appears to run people through what Ms. Ruehl called his “take-no-prisoners bull detector.” The “jealous guarding of the inner life,” she said, is an artist’s necessity and instinct.

She was talking about Mr. Albee and also about Louise Nevelson as reimagined by him. “But Edward’s cautiousness,” she added, “can feel at times to the interlocutor like being put down. Once at a dinner, after speaking about the passing away of loved ones, I asked him what he thought about death and immortality. ‘I never think about it,’ he responded a bit sharply. I heard the door firmly shut on that conversation. Of course, over the years, that sound has become familiar to me and consequently not so threatening. Humbling, yes, but also informative, entertaining and sometimes touching.”

Perhaps one effect of age on Mr. Albee is that some doors no longer close completely, regardless of how hard they’re slammed. He seemed to sense this, and even sadly welcome it, when he started to talk about “Me, Myself & I.” While he was writing Act I, he explained, his companion, the sculptor Jonathan Thomas, was found to have bladder cancer. Mr. Albee put aside the manuscript to care for him as he underwent chemotherapy and surgery.

“I was expecting to die way before Jonathan did,” Mr. Albee said. “He was 18 years younger than I was, and the whole idea was that when I got to be my age, he’d be taking care of me, you know? But life doesn’t always work out the way it’s supposed to.” Mr. Thomas died in May 2005, at 59.

“I couldn’t write for a long time,” Mr. Albee went on. “I mean I didn’t feel like it. One thing I learned was that grief is easily turned into self-pity. Yes, someone that you’re with is fading, going out of focus. But, my God, if we ever lose sight of the fact that they have had the greater loss, then we’re being selfish and self-indulgent.”

He shivered with disgust at this common human emotion, and after a moment I asked, “Are you lonely?”

“Lonely?” he said. “Oh hell, I miss Jonathan a lot, and there are times that I wish I had somebody there in the bed with me, but I’ve not been able to bring myself to want that. The mourning never ends; it just changes. But then I got back into a feeling of usefulness, which helps. In fact I wrote the second act of ‘Me, Myself & I’ in deep grief, but I didn’t let that change the play. It’s a cold response, perhaps, but ——”

“You wouldn’t want your reputation ruined,” I said.

“Not for a second. And, you know, we had such a good, long relationship: nearly 35 years. That’s a long time, a life in itself. Of course that makes it worse, but at the same time you can’t just say, ‘How dare you go away from me?’ — which is an attitude that a lot of people get. ‘How dare you die!’ There’s got to be a lot of ‘Thank you’ too. ‘Thank you for being alive and being with me for so long.’”

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Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, Beverlee McKinsey and Richard Easton in Virginia Woolf in the early 1960s.Credit
The New York Times

He paused for a moment, to catch his voice. “Oh, I’m getting too emotional here,” he said. “I don’t like to cry in front of people.”

Act II of “Me, Myself & I” shows similar restraint, completely maintaining the existential levity and vaudevillian antics of Act I even though it concerns one twin’s decision to untwin himself: to detach his identity from that of his mirror image forever. It’s a poignant image of the loss of a partner, but Mr. Albee slammed that door by saying that the plot was already in place before the play’s birth was interrupted.

We expect artists, at least in extremis, to admit if not wallow in their humanity. But Mr. Albee stands aloof from all that. He is amazed that people are more interested in Beethoven’s deafness than in Beethoven’s music, and troubled by the pervasive idea that one explains the other. Which is not to say his writing is unaffected by his emotions. It’s just that there’s a kind of air-lock system keeping the worlds separate. Even loss must stand in a queue.

“Wait until the next play,” Mr. Albee said. “I know it’s going to cover a great deal of what we’ve been talking about. It’s not a delayed reaction. It’s a reaction that’s coming at the proper time, when I can handle it with better equanimity. I keep saying that people should be objective enough to write a play in praise of Hitler. Yes, I bet I would be able to do that.”

But not this season. There are those four productions to monitor, a responsibility he doesn’t take lightly. Pam MacKinnon, who is directing the first and last of them, described Mr. Albee as very involved and very exacting. “When I first knew I was going to direct ‘Peter and Jerry,’ ” she said, “I asked him to read the dog story” — the six-page aria in which Jerry describes his attempts to win the affection of or kill his landlady’s hideous pet. “Hearing him read it, with his own cadence, was fantastically illuminating. Though I shouldn’t say he read it. He didn’t need to. He knows it by heart.”

She went on carefully. “But he can also be a bit withholding. Sometimes he’ll say, ‘You have to figure this out yourself,’ or ‘I wrote it so many years ago I don’t remember.’ He truly believes that the meaning of the play is there on the page where he put it.”

For the same reason he rarely rewrites his finished works; it would be like letting a stranger rewrite them. In this, as in most things, he seems to avoid the swamp of self-doubt. He has instead the sangfroid of a con man, but beneath the blur of moving shells — if only you pick the right one — are genuine prizes.

He can be very charming. He supports younger artists not only by working with them but also through the foundation he started when proceeds from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” proved, as he put it, “abundant.” He teaches extensively (albeit sometimes caustically) and turns honorary degrees into opportunities to lament “the destruction of democracy in the United States” and proselytize for change.

He is what used to be called a public artist: the kind whose eminence has given him, as he put it, “more than one vote” and who casts those votes as effectively as possible. At almost 80, though, he might be forgiven if he chose to cast only the plays he has time left to write. But he doesn’t feel that pressure.

“I’m not in a hurry,” he said. “I keep having ideas. The creative mind doesn’t seem to have collapsed. I’ll worry more about that when I’m 90. Meanwhile I take pretty good care of myself, and I have no enthusiasm whatever about dying. I think it’s a terrible waste of time, and I don’t want to participate in it.”

Having been adopted (or bought, as he often says, for $133.30), he cannot guess what his genes have in store for him; in any case he’s not depending on them. (“I’ll survive on pure orneriness,” he said.) Nor, as much as he mourns Mr. Thomas, does he feel unable to go on without him. Like the flowers in his small French painting — or, more likely, like the larger painting with the hole at its center — he’s used to separation. It is the story of his plays and, though he might balk at the connection, the story of his life.